343 has "players' needs and interests in mind."

The Battlefront II loot box controversy threw a huge spanner in the works for developer DICE and publisher EA, and so it’s no wonder that other devs and pubs are looking to avoid that kind of negative attention. The very phrase “loot box” is guaranteed to trigger the more vocal members of the gaming community.

Brad Sams, a reputable industry source who provided accurate leaks of the Xbox One X and Xbox Elite controller, has been claiming that Microsoft has been re-evaluating Halo 6 loot boxes and microtransactions.

Looking to nip this potential argument in the bud, Halo franchise director Frank O’Connor posted the following comments on Resetera:

This is bunk. We’re not reevaluating anything (significant) and “Microsoft” isn’t designing anything for the next game – 343 is. We watched the EA battlefront thing with the curiosity you’d expect – but our current req system is player focused and well liked and unintrusive as far as these things go.

We have made zero announcements about our next projects and continue to work on our next game and technology with player’s needs and interests in mind.

However the story as loosely presented as it is – has no bearing on or relation to any current efforts.

I suppose you could say “company x is evaluating feature you” and always have some grain of truth, but we are neither aping nor adapting an unrelated system from another game.

This follows an equally vague rumor about an issue with our engine, which in fact is counter to significant ongoing improvements and evolution of our tech.

If there were some nugget of truth to both, I’d just ignore it. Development is rife with normal examples of both of these “stories” but in this case there aren’t even notable small examples that this could have been based on.

Certainly in the future we’ll be evolving our systems and tech and maybe these general and vague statements will have brief applicability. But right now? Nah.

The majority of the gaming community are now treating this rumor as inaccurate. Of course, we may never know the complete truth, and we’ll be waiting a while until we play Halo 6 and see everything for ourselves.